Measuring atmospheric conditions such as temperature and humidity allows aircraft and airborne vehicles to make flight adjustments to achieve a desired level of performance and avoid undesirable flying conditions. In addition, measuring the present state of atmospheric conditions is necessary to forecast future atmospheric events such as storms. Measuring the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere can be performed to varying degrees using ground-base instrumentation, by sensors carried aloft in balloons or other airborne vehicles, by sensors in aircraft as they pass through a region of atmosphere, and by using predictive modeling based on past measurements.
However, over oceans and in underdeveloped regions of the world, ground-based instrumentation and dedicated sensor equipment like weather balloons either do not exist or it may be economically impractical to cover an area with sufficient sensors to provide the desired level of accuracy. Additionally, aircraft may pass through an area too infrequently to provide current conditions for other later aircraft. And dynamic atmospheric conditions generally make modeling grow less precise over time, and although good for approximating general conditions for regional conditions, modeling can be inaccurate at finer granularities. Sensors, and especially fixed instrumentation, are limited to surveying portions of the atmosphere proximate to the sensor apparatus at the time the sensor measurements were made. A moving aircraft or airborne vehicle may travel through multiple overlapping zones of coverage and areas without coverage during a flight.